A Local Area Networks (LAN) is a short distance data communications network (typically within a building or campus, though not necessarily so limited) used to link together computers and peripheral devices under some form of standard control. Personal computers, information appliances, and other computing devices have become so numerous and ubiquitous that many families are now purchasing routing devices to establish home networking LANS. Often this is done to share a common broadband access point (e.g.—a cable modem) among a number or computers or other information appliances, or to share peripherals such as printers. Many other motivations also exist to establish LANS. A router may be a stand-alone routing device or incorporated within the broadband modem or other node. They may be wired or wireless. One common feature among routers is that they all have ports through which connections are made to a Wide Area Network (WAN) and/or LAN.
Routers typically have multiple physical ports assigned as LAN ports, but usually only a single physical port designated as a WAN port (although there are routers on the market which feature multiple WAN ports). In a typical home network environment, the router's LAN ports service computers, printers, and other information appliances which are desired to be coupled to the LAN, while the router's WAN port is used to gain access to the Internet via a modem (such as a cable, dial-up, or DSL modem). Designation as a WAN port therefore signals router applications like firewall, Network Address and Port Translation (NAPT), packet routing and others to treat all packet traffic to/from the port as unsecured and non-trusted as compared to LAN port packet traffic. This designation as a WAN port is used by the router for special unsecured and non-trusted functionalities when manipulating, routing and filtering packets internally between the designated WAN port and LAN ports. The WAN port is given a specific physical port assignment within the router, and present routers do not have the capability to reassign the WAN port to a different physical port. This becomes problematic when the WAN port is faulty and becomes unusable, making the router virtually unusable since its ability to transmit data to and from an unsecured WAN (such as the Internet) becomes untenable or compromised.